It is believed that procurement of goods and services has traditionally involved high transaction costs. The cost of finding and qualifying potential bidders has been particularly high. The advent of electronic commerce, however, has introduced new methods of procurement that lower some of the transaction costs associated with procurement. Electronic procurement, and in particular business-to-business electronic procurement, matches buyers and suppliers and facilitates transactions that take place on networked systems.
Supplier-bidding auctions for products and services defined by a buyer have been developed. In a supplier-bidding auction, bid prices may start high and move downward in reverse-auction format as suppliers interact to establish a closing price. The auction marketplace is often one-sided, i.e., one buyer and many potential suppliers. It is believed that, typically, the products being purchased are components or materials. “Components” may mean fabricated tangible pieces or parts that become part of assemblies of durable products. Example components include steering wheels, gears, bearings, appliance shelves, or door handles. “Materials” may mean bulk quantities of raw materials that are further transformed into product. Example materials include corn syrup or sheet steel.
Industrial buyers may wish to purchase more than one component or material at a time. More specifically, they may wish to purchase whole families of similar components or materials in order to achieve economic means of scale. These items (i.e., similar lines of components or materials) may be grouped into a single lot. That is, a lot may include one or more of similar components or materials, each of which constitutes a line item. Suppliers in industrial auctions may provide unit price quotes for one or more line items in a lot.
Furthermore, industrial buyers not only purchase more than one component or material at a time, but also they purchase components or materials in relatively high frequency within a given period of time (e.g., two or more times a year). As noted, these components or materials typically undergo further processing. For example, steering wheels may need to be fitted specifically for particular motor vehicles. As such, these components and/or materials must meet specific standards (or specifications). These standards, along with other pertinent information relating to the line items, are typically conveyed from a buyer 10 to suppliers 30 using a report.
Creating a report that outlines detailed specifications relating to items in an online auction may be a time consuming, arduous task. For instance, all relevant data relating to the specification of the items must be collected from the buyer prior to generating a report. Once the data is collected, it may be used to generate a detailed report that is distributed to one or more selected suppliers. In some instances, however, relevant information must be carefully selected from the data prior to generating a report. For instance, each supplier may desire certain requirements on the report, and, as such, the report may need to be tailored for each supplier. An operator typically enters this information manually in a given form to create the detailed report for each individual supplier. This process not only increases time requirement, often taking several hours to create a report for one supplier, but also increases a risk of entering wrong information in the report.
Thus, it is believed that there is a need for system and method of streamlining a data collection process for an online auction. In addition, it is believed that there is a need for system and method of streamlining a report generation process for an online auction.